Monday, September 26, 2016

As humans, none of us is perfect. Even if we can, on occasion, execute perfectly on something more often than not we all need to course correct at some point. Some examples of when we need to course correct are:

Having incorrect or invalidated assumptions

Starting something that has a lot of ambiguity

Finding out about missing or hidden dependencies

Having a plan that falls short of delivering on a specific commitment.

Failing to accomplish a goal, milestone or key deliverable

That list isn't exhaustive and is applicable to the projects we work on, the way we interact with our peers/directs/superiors, career development and many other aspects of our lives. Having mechanisms in place to help you correct your course *before* or soon after you get off track will help you be more successful. Here are some tips to help you setup mechanisms that enable course correction.

Be willing to change course

As humans change doesn't come easy for us. Once we set ourselves on a certain course we will naturally want to continue down that course because it's easy. This may sound obvious, but course correcting starts with being willing to change course.

What this means practically is that you have to be open to:

Being wrong

Doing more work

Scraping work you've already done

Having difficult conversations

Asking difficult questions

Being relentless about seeking the truth and proceeding with the *right* data

Ask questions that help you understand when course correction is needed

There are several questions that I try to consistently ask when checking in on the progress of something I'm working toward:

Where am I on track?

Where am I ahead of schedule?

Where am I behind schedule?

Is there anything I plan to work on that I no longer need to?

Do I need to re-arrange priorities?

Is what I'm working on right now the simplest/fastest/most efficient way to achieve my goal?

What information do I have now that I didn't when I started? How does that change my approach?

Is everything I depend on to be successful still on-track? If not, what does it take to get back on track?

How does the recent decision about X affect me?

Meet regularly with your key stakeholders and solicit feedback

Making sure that you're on the right course means talking with your stakeholders often. Depending on the context of what you're trying to achieve, the form of these meeting may look different. But the key is that you're meeting regularly and getting as much feedback as you can.

Some common forms these meetings take are:

One-on-ones: This is where you are meeting with an individual regularly and asking for specific perspective and feedback. These meetings are more intimate and can typically get into a lot of depth. These typically occur weekly or bi-weekly.

Daily project sync up: Most agile teams do this in the form of a daily scrum. The purpose of this meeting is to make sure everyone is aware of hyper local changes. Talk about what was accomplished yesterday, what you plan to accomplish today, and what you may be blocked on.

Program status meetings: This is where you meet with the key participants of a project or program and check in on the status. In this meeting you want to focus on things that are either off track or at risk of being off track. Most often I've seen this occur weekly or bi-weekly. It's really important to have people in this meeting who can authorize change.

Stakeholder meetings: These are regular sync ups with the people that depend on you and your work or that you depend on. These meetings are typically with people that you don't have much visibility into day to day operations with.

Team/Org meetings: This is time with your direct team. This time is best used for vision casting, transparency, and/or checking the temperature of the team (i.e. how are people feeling).

Monday, September 19, 2016

Most of the software development shops I've worked at in my career didn't have developers deploy their own code. Typically the developers would create a release and hand it off to QA who would do some combination of manual, automated, and performance testing. When bugs or performance issues were found they'd send the release back upstream to developers who were already working on the next feature.

This creates a culture of fear that the production system needed to be protected from the developers. This is unhealthy in my opinion. Software development teams should be deploying their own software for four main reasons:

Ownership

Accountability

Insight

Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment

Ownership

Software teams that deploy and maintain their own software in production tend to have a higher level of ownership. This is because they are involved in the full end-to-end software development life-cycle rather than just building the software. They become better aware of the machines (whether physical or virtual) that their software runs on. They're more likely to insist and push for deployment automation as developers tend to hate repetitive manual tasks.

When the developer isn't responsible for deploying their code they move on to the next problem space after they've "shipped" their code to operations. This typically means they've moved on both mentally and emotionally from that release. When a developer is responsible for pushing to production they're invested in the release getting all the way to customers. They become responsible for diving in and solving problems that pop up during deployment.

Accountability

When you're responsible for maintaining software in production, you're more likely to be accountable to what happens in production. Specifically, the dev team becomes more accountable to:

Bugs

Test coverage

Deployment failures

Poor performing code

When you work at scale there are often bugs that only show up in production. When developers deploy to production they become more accountable for fixing bugs, performance issues, and deployment failures as they are directly exposed to them during the release cycle. One thing I've seen successful organizations do is, when a release fails, block all further releases until the deployment succeeds. Developers that are accountable for these failures will be encouraged to fix them because they're prevented from moving on to the next new thing until the current thing is successfully deployed.

Insight

Understanding the health of your system means having the right metrics and validations in place. When software developers own deploying to production they're more likely to instrument their code well because they will need to validate that their deployments are successful. In my experience teams that deploy their own code better understand the performance characteristics and health of their systems. They are also better able to diagnose problems because they're familiar with the differences between their development and test environments and the production system.

Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment

When a team owns their code end-to-end they are setup for success with respect to continuous integration and continuous deployment. They don't have to jump through hoops in getting their code into production and they can integrate deployment and test tools directly into their development pipeline. This encourages them to ship smaller features more often. By doing this, they decrease the time it takes to close the feedback loop and are better able to adapt to their customers ever changing needs.

Monday, September 12, 2016

Recently I was watching the film Hector and the Search for Happiness and it got me thinking about how work can either be a source of happiness or contribute to a sense of unease or unhappiness with your life. There are a few quotes from the movie which I think should be examined in the context of your job and your overall happiness.

Making comparisons can spoil your happiness

Even if you work at a company that stack ranks it's employees, you are not your peers. While looking to others and their accomplishments can be a great source of inspiration, comparing yourself to others can also be an easy road to unhappiness.

Instead of comparing yourself to specific people, who may or may not have the same gifts and talents as you, figure out what achieving and exceeding your goals in *your role* means. This means sitting down with your boss and having a conversation about the expectations of your role and what your goals are. I highly recommend creating SMART goals.

Work towards achieving *your* goals and not towards being better than your peers. If you consistently achieve or beat your expectations it won't matter if you're better than your peers. You'll feel valued and appreciated and likely will be rewarded for your effort.

Many people only see happiness in their future

Are you one of those people that only seems to be happy if you know you're on track to a promotion or a particular set of responsibilities or ownership? Having an aspirational goal is great, but if it's the only source of happiness at work it's getting in your way more than it's helping.

What is getting in your way of being happy right where you are? Make a list of the top five things in your current job that are getting in the way of your happiness. Then create a set of goals for each one to affect real change in your current role.

For example: let's say you have a co-worker who is driving you nuts. They're overly critical of your work and you feel like they're targeting you in an unfair manner. Set a goal to try to dig deeper into the tension and try to see your interactions from *their* side. Be blunt and honest and tell them you feel tension and would like to resolve it. You'd be surprised how much unhappiness in your current situation is resolvable simply by bringing it up.

Fear is an impediment to happiness

What fear is causing you to dread going into the office? Is that fear rooted in reality? The typical work related fear I experience is not feeling like I am on the same par as my peers. I'm afraid that I have to work harder than them to get the same thing or less accomplished. But at the end of the day this fear usually turns out to be baseless.

I've found that the best way to root out fear at work is to work closely with your manager and your stakeholders and define what success looks like. Your manager should be able to paint a picture of what success in your role looks like. Very likely, this will start with a job description or some internal HR document that describes the necessities of your role. Talk with your boss about that and ask for specific examples of meeting those expectations or exceeding them in your current projects. You should do the same with your project stakeholders. Make sure that what you're planning to deliver is what they're expecting you to deliver.

You're likely going to spend 2000+ hours a year at work. Why not make it a source of joy?

Monday, September 5, 2016

We use writing in all aspects of our lives whether it's an email, a text message, a blog or something else entirely. Writing is one of the most powerful mediums we have in communicating our ideas. Given that, it's important for you to understand how to communicate effectively.

Understand what you are trying to achieve

Before you communicate in writing you should clearly understand what you are trying to achieve. Are you trying to disseminate information? Are you making a call to action? Are you soliciting information? Understanding this will help you better frame your narrative such that you can effectively achieve your goals.

Lead with the call to action

This is akin to putting the most important information first. Your reader shouldn't have to hunt for what you're asking them to do. You should be explicit up front about *what* the call to action is and then provide more information as to *why* you're calling them to act.

Someone familiar with the problem space should be able to stop reading after the first few paragraphs or the first page and grasp the main point of the text. Your reader should only have to dig into the back story if they want. Providing too much context can get in the way of what you're trying to achieve. On the flip side, not providing enough context can leave your reader with more questions than when they started. If you layer in the context you give your reader the ability to choose if they have enough information or if they need to keep reading.

Footnotes: Writing is a unique medium that allows you to point out where your data comes from in such a way as to not distract from the main point. Footnotes give you the opportunity to back up your narrative with facts, but allow you to layer them in such that the reader only has to read what they care about.

Appendices: If you have a lot of context that is important but not primary to the narrative, throw them in an appendix. The curious or skeptical reader can go and dig more into the *why* of your narrative without you having to detract from the flow.

Read it out loud

Proof reading silently make it very easy for your mind to skip over something that you've spent a good amount of time on. Proof reading out loud allows you to find areas where the narrative doesn't flow. It also gives you the opportunity to figure out where you have too much or too little information.

About Me

I’ve been in the technology industry for 14+ years mostly as a Software Developer. I've worked on projects ranging from a Ruby on Rails Portal, a high performance/low latency .NET search stack, R&D for building infrastructure in the cloud including automated server builds using Chef, to architecting and building iOS and Android Mobile platforms and frameworks.I've also spent some time building Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and Bada mobile applications that focused on the presentation of long form audio/video.The middle of my career was spent at MSNBC working on their content management publishing platform, their video syndication system, as well as being a co-creator of their iOS iPad framework from which the Rachel Maddow, Today Show, and Nightly News iPad apps were built.Finally, the beginning of my career was spent writing software on government contracts with a few years spent writing criminal investigation software.